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Topic: Questions about r/c robot (Read 1783 times)

Hi Guys: I am planning to build a r/c robot for my school project. My plan is to make a robot that can move forward, reverse, and turn. It will have two arms that rotates 90 or 180 degrees. My first questions would be,is it too hard if I want to build my own transmitters or receivers which can control all the actions? What would be the approximate cost of all the parts I need ?

I am currently studying electronics at a technical college, I have been through some microcontroller and programming courses so I don't think I will have any problem reading the schematics and doing programming. However, since this is a school project, I only have 3 months of weekends to work on it. Will I have enough time ?

I guess my first question would be is it going to be a robot or an R/C vehicle?

An R/C vehicle would do what you told it to do by remote control -thats human thinking. A robot would do those things that you wanted it to do, but decide on it's own by software and sensors -thats robot thinking!! good stuff there!!

If you want to use RC control (like me, I dont like the idea of having a robot do ALL of the thinking ), you might want to invest in a nice radio with lots of channels. If you get a good one to start, you can keep on using it for years to come on all of your robot projects, and maybe get into RC for fun

If you can spend the cash for a transmitter/reciever, I would look into the Futaba 10c 2.4ghz system. It uses 2.4ghz so you wont get any frequency issues with other transmitters. Also the 10c has 10 channels, which should be enough for anything you will use in the future. The 12-14 channel radios run more than $1200, while the 10c is $600. A good deal IMO for a 10 channel radio. But the best feature is that it has 3 knobs and 2 slider switches, more than any other radios in its class. Lower channel (7 and under) only have the gimbals and some 2 or 3 position switches.

Right now I am using a Spektrum DX7 2.4ghz radio, it has 7 channels and is $300, but no slider or knob switches. In a year or two I will probably upgrade to the 10c, but I would have much rather gotten the 10c from the beginning.

Thanks for the suggestion guy. Since I am a complete beginner I guess the project I will be building is just a "R/C vehicle". Unfortunately I don't have that much to spend so I am going to build my own transmitter and receiver circuit with the use of DTMF. Has anyone here tried building this circuit before ?